Week 2

First sight, the wonderous maladjustment to the newness of a place, is beginning to smooth itself into a new normal. Once radically independent of me - only absorbed by my senses, the blare of horns pressing through this narrow market street, the sunlight hotly panting at the windows, the staccato yelp of cats, are all slowly moving from sensed to remembered.

The city of Tel Aviv is a thinly and hastily applied cement mascara that manages to trick the eyes into seeing nothing of the suggestive, sensuous stir of dunes under her outer garments. You get the sense that beneath all her strange stacks of cement and brick, she can really move - but she's afraid that if she does, they'll get thrown askew. What's worse is, she seems to have pieced together her outfit from items that have no perceivable relationship with one another: the buildings here don't talk to one another, nor to the quiet dunes, and certainly not to the whispering sea.

I'm trying to listen through the cottony, unraveling, yet often suffocating solitude of life alone in a new place. In the occasional moments I trust the wisdom of the me that chose these circumstances, my body begins to sense when it needs to breath with awareness, or talk to Spirit. I can hear my dreams
more clearly through this alone-ness.

Everybody visits me in dream-time - friends, pets, relatives, living and dead. I wake up feeling like I have been held and caressed by someone I love.

Biking pulls me out of my isolation. As I pedal through the city, pedestrian paths suddenly cascade in a dozen ribbons of walkways: rippling over narrow bridges, unfurling under roads, fluttering toward busy streets. At this point, maps stop speaking the language of their territories. What's essential becomes what has always been true: the river drinks from the sea and flows alongside me, and the sun will take me back to its mouth when I need to return home.

After I bring in Shabbat somewhere tonight, I plan to go to a belated "Full Moon" party on the beach somewhere between Tel Aviv and Hertzelia - a place to drink in the tangy sweetness of collective effervescence, to boogie with the spirit of Shabbat. Indeed, in the many years I've danced with her, I've noticed she stomps her feet on the ground more boldly and throws her body more sensually when draped in starlight and against the swell of waves than she does bleached in city lights.

A few days ago someone pointed out that here, people face west when they pray - that the sea is their kotel, their Temple. What they orient to in their prayer here is something alive and flowing, not in ruins somewhere.

If I bike tonight, I will scan the air for beats, and cast my eyes far into the distance hoping they will hover and fall on the soft pulse of lights from the coast below.